Beyond the Willow Tree creates especially valuable keepsake items for stillbirthday families, including placenta and umbilical cord keepsakes.
Support for birth. Support for bereavement. Support for you.
Beyond the Willow Tree creates especially valuable keepsake items for stillbirthday families, including placenta and umbilical cord keepsakes.
(here is a printable poster from Doran)
This is a one day workshop for birth workers to learn how to provide compassionate, comprehensive support to families enduring loss, including why and how to establish strong support resources for yourself.
If you are an aspiring doula, birth doula, postpartum doula, monitrice, midwife or nurse, this workshop is right for you.
Subjects we will explore:
What you will gain:
This will be a hands on, interactive workshop. Using demonstrations, examples, projects and discussion, you will leave with tools you need to be better prepared in all birth situations. You will identify similarities and differences in loss to other traumas a family may experience, you’ll strengthen your understanding of the connections between events in a mother’s obstetrical history, you’ll learn the importance of being supported yourself, and you’ll see how your trust in your own support network will impact your response to your client. You’ll begin to build a strong foundation of support for yourself that you need to be the best you can be, for your clients, and for yourself.
You will spend time in reflection, evaluating your own values and interpretations of life and death. Workshops are an intimate gathering intended to enrich and inspire. More than just a checklist of things to make sure you do or say for bereaved families, the workshop environment will slow you, deepen you, and connect you with the families you serve in a profound way. The workshop is a safe environment. Please open yourself to being gently challenged.
You’ll also receive handouts that will cover what we won’t have enough time to during the workshop.
You’ll bring your own lunch, and we will take breaks between segments.
This workshop is available through a collaboration with Doran Richards of Blessing God’s Way.
When:
Saturday, June 1, 2013 – all day event
Where:
Strasburg, VA
Venue: Ridge Apartments, Community Center 170 E. Reservoir Rd., Woodstock, VA 22664
Dulles is the closest airport
Price:
Workshop plus Discounted Full Training:
A part of Bambi’s Fit to Heal column.
As the new year dawns upon us, many make the resolution to get in shape or lose weight. That in itself is admirable as our physical health is very important. However, most end up abandoning this resolution because it just seems like an insurmountable task. When I began my journey, for the third time, I chose to surround myself with supportive people. I became accountable to others and let’s face it, you don’t want people that you love and respect to see you as a failure. It was so incredibly hard to take that step, but, it needed done. I made myself get it together. I couldn’t eat what my family was eating. I couldn’t have anything I loved. I had to get up every day, get kids off to school, and go to the gym. I was scared about how I looked because I was fat and could feel everything jiggle as I moved. I didn’t know anybody there. It was weird and hard.
After a few months, I was still accountable, seeing results, and making new friends that supported my efforts. I even made a friend who became my workout partner that trained with me to prepare ourselves for The Warrior Dash. Living the life was much easier when it was my life. I learned that I could splurge some on foods that I loved, within moderation. I also noticed that my mental health was improving. Working out actually made me happier and it helped regulate the same hormones that would cause monthly depression. Actually, it also improved my very uncomfortable menstrual cycles!
What about you?
Where are you at in your goal of getting fit to heal? Have you thought about how physical care can impact your bereavement journey? Have you considered taking practical steps toward physical fitness? What makes the decision to create a healthier lifestyle more difficult after baby loss? What makes the decision to create a healthier lifestyle difficult in general?
This is a portion of stillbirthday designated to bring awareness to the realities and struggles that pertain to living grief. Examples of aspects that may find themselves within this demographic can include:
Living Grief: grieving aspects of parenthood, related to children who are alive: includes birth trauma, adoption, surrogacy, menopause
Stewarding Grief: emotional aspects of deciding to limit or inhibit fertility
Library of Stories:
I need your support. I need you to tell everyone you know that I need their support. Stillbirthday is breaking ground on something enormous, and I can’t do it alone.
I need you to be a part of this.
I want to open the very first Palliative Birth Center. Let me share my vision with you:
Stillbirthday Palliative Birth Center
and Family Centered Infant Burial Meadow
A facility that provides holistic prenatal, palliative, birth, and farewell care, including:
Stillbirthday Palliative Birth Center affirms:
How you can help:
In short, we need a whole lot of prayers, and we need a whole lot of money. Please, consider how you can help. Please email Heidi.Faith@stillbirthday.info to get involved. It would be an honor to have one or more primary financial founders who would be instrumental in providing the support that so many families deserve. If you would consider becoming a large financial founder, you would be establishing a living legacy that would impact the world in a much needed, tremendously significant way.
This is just a sample birth center floor plan. Here is the online source for this sample photo.
You can contribute to the development of our Palliative Birth Center in any amount:
You can send your thoughts, letters of encouragement, written prayers, and/or financial support to:
The M0M Center
101 W. Washington Street
Kearney MO 64060
With checks payable to:
Christian Childbirth Services LLC
The M0M Center is a refuge to give birth to healing. It is the first piece to this Palliative Birth Center vision.
The M0M Center began in a 600 square foot facility and after the first year we relocated to a space that is more than double the size to make room for our growing ministries and services.
The M0M Center on facebook
The M0M Center website
Below is a list of people and organizations who have supported our vision by contributing
toward the development of the Stillbirthday Palliative Birth Center:
Certified Birth & Bereavement Doula® serving in California
Email: AngieHugle.SBD@stillbirthday.info
Visit Angie’s website.
Certified Birth & Bereavement Doula® serving in Saskatchewan, Canada
Email: MichelleDueck.SBD@stillbirthday.info
Michelle’s doula listing at Doula Match provides additional contact information.
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Told by: RaeAnne
My husband and I have been happily married since January 2009. When we first were married, we knew we wanted children, but also knew we wanted some time to focus on our marriage. So we waited until the summer of 2011 to start trying. It didn’t take long; we had a positive test early in September. We were overjoyed and immediately began preparing for our sweet little one. Yes, we knew miscarriage was a possibility, but we were not going to let fear steal our joy. Somewhere in my heart, I knew he would be a boy all along. Much to many of my friends dismay, I started buying all the adorable blue and brown things I would need to make his room in our home soon after learning he was there. By the time I was 11 weeks along, we already had amassed a large portion of the things he would need (and I still didn’t have proof he was a he). I just knew that no matter what happened, he would be a part of our hearts and home forever. Why wait?
And then, IT happened.
We went in for a routine ultrasound at 13 weeks just to say hello to our little guy. I will never forget that day for the rest of my life. As I laid there, with love in my heart and joy spread all over my face, watching our tiny, adorable little one bouncing around the screen, the doctor suddenly turned the screen away and said, “I’m seeing something disconcerting”. I think my entire world stopped turning. My husband grabbed my hand and we asked her for more information. There was not much more to be had that day. She noticed he was holding fluid in his tummy and wasn’t sure what that meant for us. She was going to send us to the Mayo Clinic in two weeks for more testing. Needless to say, those two weeks were excruciating. We were so worried for our little one and had no information about what on earth the problem was. Somehow, we made it to the appointment. As soon as the ultrasound began, I immediately lost it. I cried and cried for my little one. His belly was so filled with fluid, it has become almost 3 times larger than the rest of his body. Something was obviously horribly wrong. After a bit of composure, and a lot of explaining, we learned that our sweet little baby had a condition called Posterior Urethral Valves (PUV). It’s a blockage in his urinary tract that kept urine from passing from his kidneys/bladder, out into the amniotic sac as it should. Instead, it was collecting in his bladder (hence the large tummy). This condition is totally a fluke, they told us, and also fatal. Our baby would not live.
I can’t begin to describe how heartbroken we were in that moment. Devastated doesn’t begin to describe it. We were shocked, bewildered, and totally lost. Typically, we were told, families terminate a pregnancy at this point. We told them loud and clear, we would never, ever end this baby’s life. Instead, we would do whatever we could to prolong it and give him as much love as we could during his short life. We found out he was a boy and named him Samuel Evan. (Samuel for the biblical story. He was loved and wanted, but had to be given back to God. Evan means little fighter). His life was going to full of love, we decided right then and there. So that’s what we did. We gave him life and love for 5 more months. We took him places, we read to him, we sang to him and we shared our lives with him. Daddy would read to him every night before we went to bed. We begged God for his life, while doing our best to prepare for his death.
On April 14th, 2012, after a long week of labor, Samuel Evan, our beautiful baby boy, was born alive. The doctors has said he would never live so long, but he was a fighter! He lived for 4 hours. Due to a mess of hospital issues, he had to be transferred to another hospital for care. Since I had to have an emergency c-section, I was not able to be with him when he died. My husband, with a strength and love I’ll never forget, was right by his side. He held his hand as Samuel took his last breaths. He cuddled him, bathed him, dressed him and rocked with him for hours before saying goodbye and returning to me. He did what I wasn’t able to do and he did it amazingly. All I could do was watch him on the computer the nurse had set up with Skype. I cried my eyes out that I couldn’t hold him, or smell him or feel him close. But there was nothing we could do, so I did my best to be grateful that he got time with his daddy all to himself. Now, it’s been almost 9 months since he died. We are heartbroken and missing him deeply. We are trying to figure out where in the world to go from here. I struggle with lots of questions. Why us? How are we going to live without him? I look back and I am so very glad we chose to carry him. I would do it all over again if I had the option, because I got to meet him and see his sweet little face. I’ve started a group* for other families who are carrying to term after a fatal diagnosis because I want them to have the chance to say hello, even though goodbye will soon follow. It’s worth it.
If you would like to read the whole story, or get in contact with some important resources I’ve created regarding carrying to term your baby with a difficult diagnosis, I blog at Nothing Without You.
The SBD® Doula provides support to families experiencing birth in any trimester and in any outcome.
Here at stillbirthday.info, you can learn about the SBD® Doula.